Professional Mirror, PhD

Professing * Reflecting

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

No time to come up for air

The work, the work, the work. What the fuck is with the exponential increase? In my absence, I have posted a doll me (thanks Profgrrrrl and Dr. Crazy for this most excellent timesuck) on the sidebar. That is what I might look like if I had time to shower, to dress, and to pose for the animator. This is what I would like to be doing right now:

Monday, March 07, 2005

Solid?

The new solid-in-my-neurosis (as B. put it so well in comments to this post) feeling has somehow made me feel as though I can easily get through all of this grading, all of this prep (Why do I insist on including new material on syllabi during busy-with-conferences spring semesters? Just why??), and all of this writing. I am not panicked. I am feeling pretty fine.

I am not grading, prepping, or writing. Rather, I am looking online at villas for sale on the Amalfi coast (in the very modest 500,000 Euros-1.5 million Euros range), reading Neruda poems aloud (in Spanish, in a booming voice, to myself), and negotiating all of the various imaginary difficulties of the four love affairs I have imagined I will be involved in the next six months (with one student, one ex-boyfriend, and two different men who are twenty years my senior). I do not/will not/have never had the means to buy an Italian villa; my Spanish sucks; and any one of these love affairs would be nothing short of catastrophic. Clearly I have lost my mind.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Solid

I am overloaded with work. I am sick. I am lonely. I am exhausted. I am sad. Last week, I starting crying in the spice aisle of the grocery store.

But how am I feeling? Completely solid. Centered. I think I have figured out how I can be stressed, depressed, sick, tired AND strangely at peace with myself and my life. And I do not think it is a matter of finally giving in and giving up . . . exactly.

Usually when when I start feeling a twinge of panic or depression, I distract myself. I hit the scene. I throw myself into an affair or two. I do the mirror thing. The mirror gig is complicated. I find someone who desperately needs to be mirrored, to see his image through me and to see me as some image of me he has in his head. I am fully complicit in this. I flash and shine. I make him flash and shine. The payoff for him is pretty obvious.

The payoff for me? As long as I am all flashy and shiny, I do not have to deal with what is below the surface, not of him but of me. While I am doing all of this, I get very anxious that there is exactly nothing below the surface, that there is only the mirror. And that anxiety has somehow been better than the real anxiety that started the whole thing--anxiety over feeling my own less than perfect feelings. In the end, a new anxiety comes into the picture. I start to feel and to express my own feelings. The mirror is not supposed to feel or is only supposed to feel in a certain reflective way, so the one-who-is-mirrored is understandably confused.

At this point, I start to project wildly. The new anxiety comes from knowing that I let myself down, that I did not let myself feel what I needed to feel, that I myself denied my own feelings and the right to feel at all. I am angry with myself but anger is one of those feelings I do not allow myself to feel, so I become extremely but abstractly angry with the one-who-is-mirrored. How dare he not let me feel! How dare he be confused not only by my feelings but also by the fact that I feel anything! But I am the one who set it up. I am the one who wrote the contract. I am the one who deliberately found someone who would not want me or need me to feel, to be this messy girl who gets pissy and grouchy and weepy and needy. (The ones who do are not interested and will not play along. In mirror mode, I find them either benignly unattractive or horrifyingly repulsive.) I can then marvel at his insensitivity and dump him. I can then become the victim and go off to lick my wounds. But I am not healing the right hurt, which is why the cycle starts again.

I have not had the time or the energy to find a distraction. If I did, I would not be able to flash and shine. I have by default done what my ex-shrink told me (for five long years of therapy, which I sabotaged at every turn and which I finally cut off when I could no longer find ways to sabotage it) that I needed to do--stay with the sadness and all of those other nasty feelings. Just be. Be sad. Be angry. Be guilty. Panic. Rage. Cry.

I am amazed at how simple it is. I am sad. I am tired. I am lonely. I am stressed. And it is fine. I can handle it. I can spontaneously burst into tears while looking for bay leaves and the sky will not fall.

About Me

mir-ror n. 1. A surface capable of reflecting sufficient undiffused light to form a virtual image of an object placed in front of it. 2. Something that faithfully reflects or gives a true picture of something else. Also called "looking glass."
pro-fess v. 1. to affirm openly; declare or claim. 2. to make a pretense of; pretend.
re-flect v. 1. to throw or bend back (light, for example) from a surface. 2. to form an image of (an object); mirror.